What are your water stories?

This poster stages a provocation to think with water as archive. Drawing on Astrida Neimanis's (2017) concept of hydrofeminist archives, the work takes seriously her claim that water holds material capacity for storage and memory — that oceans harbour flotsam, chemicals, bodies, detritus, and sunken treasure alongside other chronicles of the past, while water more broadly, as oral traditions attest, serves as a literal container of story and history bearing collective cultural remembrance. If water is understood as an archive of story, then the question this poster poses is deceptively simple: what are your water stories? Rather than offering answers, the poster operates as an invitation — a provocation designed to draw out the submerged, dispersed, and often untold narratives that individuals and communities carry in relation to water: memories of rivers, floods, coastlines, drought, ritual, migration, and loss. In doing so, it positions water not as passive backdrop but as active participant in the construction of collective memory, asking viewers to consider their own entanglement with water as a form of embodied, storied knowledge.

Poster for Collective Curriculum 2, Melbourne Design Week.